Some of my photographs

Political images

Fuck Fukayama

Dialectic of Bhanality

Notes on Spielberg's War of the Worlds

The Archers and conservative culture-criticism

Bad News for the Greenazis

On "Political Correctness" and Ruskin College

Has Roth Lost the Plot ?

Nietzsche's Politics

Philosophical Parables

How I Met Rudi Gloder

Visions of the Present

Jung and Gender Categories

Part 1


Part 2

The Ruskin Relativist - A criticism of Theatres of Memory

Marx Comes First, and Looses - On the Cunning of Unreason

Review of The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

How not to Understand Marx

Indignant Pages

Nerdz Nite Out

A Tradition We Must Renounce

The Base/Superstructure Model - Conformist not Communist

A Dialogue with Keith Jenkins

Thoughts on The Matrix

Not More Equality

We Weren't Subversives ... Honest, Guv

Denying the Nazi Connection

Tony Martin, People's Hero

Picnic in the Ruins

Realising Personal Truths - An Independent View

Gaysex in the Bible

Slavo Zizek on Lenin

On the Ontology of Jennydahling

The Englishman Who Went up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain

Parrots and Owls

'I Remember Babylon'

Bisexualism and Polar Thinking

Nietzsche and the Nietzsche-icon

I think that you would strengthen your case (whichever one it happens to be) if you refrained from using the ridiculous phrase 'political correctness'. I know that I’m not the only person whose first feeling on seeing this is that I will not bother to read whatever text contains it. Because the use of that phrase usually signals a voice which, comically, echoes that victim-stance of which it so often complains and whines that ‘white, het, middle-class  men can be victims too’. This usually boils down to the speaker pretending to feel  oppressed because of disapproval of sexist comments re women, and use of words like 'nigger' and 'shirt-lifter'. Its use is so often prefaced by ‘I’m sorry, but …’; followed by something like ‘I know it’s politically incorrect to say so, but there was slavery in Africa  long before Europeans got there’ - as if the speaker were being a brave heretic, whilst actually mouthing a commonplace (which also obscures the main point). I choose this example for you because of your odious apologetics for slavery. However, I do feel somewhat as you do regarding this sensibility which this phrase tries to capture -  what follows is a first attempt to try to work this out.

What seems not to be noticed by people who use the phrase is the bizarre fact that ‘politically correct’ is the only political label which is solely used pejoratively of someone else. All of the following may be used neutrally, pejoratively, or accepted as self-identity: liberal, socialist, communist, stalinist, trotskyist, nationalist, anarchist, fascist, national-socialist, racist, feminist, masculinist, conservative, reactionary, pacifist … and doubtless others which don’t come to mind at present. But no-one will say, except ironically:  'I’m Politically Correct'. There is surely something very strange about this asymmetry.

Origin

It might be worthwhile considering the genealogy of this term. The entry in Wikipedia is useful here :

The term "political correctness" is said to derive from Marxist-Leninist vocablary [sic] to describe the "party line". By the 1970s this term, re-appropriated as a satirical form of criticism, was being used by some on the Left to dismiss the views of other Leftists whom they deemed too doctrinaire and rigid. It was in this sense that the popular usage of the phrase in English derived

One of the references in this is to an American conservative who claims that ‘Political Correctness’ is a form of ‘cultural marxism’ , on the basis that it derives from the work of the Frankfurt School. I won’t go into this, other than to note that ‘Political Correctness’ would be comprehended by anyone who stands on the shoulders of the giants of Critical Theory (as I attempt to) as a nuance within that cultural hegemony whose core position that the societal order structured around the wagelabour/capital relation is the final form of human association. 

However, this remark is on to something very important in seeing that the origin of  ‘Political Correctness’ is in the culture of Euro-American Stalinism. This was a culture which interwove with a seemingly very different culture - that which would now be called  the ‘alternative culture’. I’m really at a loss as to how to adequately characterise this, my gut instinct uses phrases like ‘do-gooders’, ‘knee-jerk liberals’ - both of which I’m uncomfortable with as they come from a conservative voice. But then conservatives do so often see things far more clearly than liberals. There is a very perceptive account of this ‘structure of feeling’ in an essay by R.A.D. Grant on Edmund Burke. Grant discusses the prescience of Burke's portrayal of 'the revolutionary and his radical fellow-traveller':

restless hyperactivity, as though to sit still were to concede one's insignificance; the hidden scorn for those one pretends to act for; ... the bogus humanitarianism; the exploitation of genuine distress; ... the clamour .. for the most truckling appeasement of one's country's known and professed enemies.(Conservative Thinkers, ed. Roger Scruton)

It is no accident that one of the most savage pictures of this early ‘alternative culture’ as ‘vegetarian, sandal-wearing, fruit-juice drinkers’ (I quote from memory) came from the author of one of the most powerful denunciations of the culture of British Stalinism - George Orwell. Though I think we must accept many of the reservations about him which deepened in successive assessments of him by Raymond Williams, we should respect the central fact that Orwell did fight in a civil war as a revolutionary communist. Part of his contempt came from the fact that it was the ancestors of today’s ‘politically correct’ who refused to publish his dispatches from Spain exposing the treachery of the Stalinists - this was done in the name of ‘unity’. The will to unity and to obliterate in rhetoric real contradictions (now carried out in the name of ‘multi-culturalism’)  is really central to this sensibility which is so poorly characterised as 'political correctness'.

The accusation of racism

However, you - and those like you - so often construct yourselves as victims. Regarding the funding by Oxford Council of the Asian Cultural Centre, you write in one of your e-ms ‘To oppose these politically correct policies would be universally seen as racist’. Now this is self-evidently absurd: You object to this, but do not regard yourself as racist. You should know that I do not regard this as a racist statement (which does not preclude the motive behind its utterance being racist – though that does not concern me here). What you are doing is setting up a straw man, which actually gets in the way of coming to terms with the phenomenon it refers to.

I myself take any opportunity to declare my opposition to state funding of mossie schools; I regard rap and hiphop music as barbaric thuggery and - as an ex-private tutor - have no doubts that a major factor in the scholastic under-achievement of black britons is parental behaviour. Admittedly, it is easier for me than for many others to do this (though, inconsistently, I argue that a person’s biography is irrelevant to the authorial voice) due partly to having sustained a permanent, though minor, disablement in a street fight with the National Front some years ago. More recently, I was the only person at Ruskin College to denounce its proselytising nazis. Indeed, it was my experience with the scum there who espouse the attitudes which you characterise as ‘politically correct’ which fuels my detestation for them.

If you wanted a sit-com to satirise ‘political correctness’ then - lest you were a new Dickens - you could not better that stew of jaded teachers who have read nothing new in the last twenty years and their semi-literate students who barely read the photocopied course handouts, secure in the knowledge that if they fail their assessments they need only go to the nice ladies at ‘Learning Support’, be found to be ‘dyslexic’ and have their marks magically levitated.

The Land of Ruskania

The very quintessence of Ruskania (google <nairn+musil+kakania> if that is obscure) is sociology lecturer (indeed, a lecturer, not a teacher), Mavis Bayton, who looks like a character out of Viz, habitually dressed like Ronald McDonald, with culottes and horizontally striped socks, attempting to state in her dress a difference which is denied in her practice. Like so many of her kind she is a health-freak, once berating a student (not me) for daring to come into her class after having been smoking outside in the open - he still had some atoms of smoke on his breath. The door of her room was covered with ‘right-on’ posters, and adverts for whatever was the cause-of-the-month; one of her icons was the Stalinist gangster Nelson Mandela.

She was favoured by some students because of her promotion of the shamradicalism of Peter Berger’s  Invitation to Sociology - A Humanistic Perspective : an intellectually shallow legitimisation of the relativism which is now the commonsense of the Hegemony, and actively promoted by the discourse of the Propaganda Apparatus. It offered back to these morons, tarted up in bad academese what they anyway took for granted. The students she specially favoured were the most semi-literate who she could patronise. Many of the rest she bored with her tales of the ‘good old days’ of the 60s and 70s when she lived in communes (here she was rivalled and complemented by the tales of ex-Trot Bob ‘Preacher’ Purdy of his days with the bourgeois nationalists of the IRA).

In the first year course she taught she would tell her students as a fact that Sociology had discovered that the reason for the disproportionate number of young black men in prison was ‘institutionalised racism’ (not obviously congruent with Berger’s thesis that ‘all reality is socially constructed’). Several of her students (some of the few who actually cared about such matters) dared to suggest that just perhaps this was because young black men actually committed (relative to their numbers) a disproportionate number of crimes. Some actually referred to their experience, on the street, and in estates, of the behaviour of young black males. These guys were dismissed as ‘racists’ and told that ‘hundreds of studies’ confirmed her view. She was beyond parody as an exemplar of that liberal type who tolerates any position except one which contradicts their own (again, it is a conservative writer who, to my awareness, best captures this: Peter Hitchens in his The Abolition of Britain). There is something about her which reminds me of the comic character Parsons, in Nineteen Eighty Four : Not very bright, but gushingly enthusiastic for whatever nonsense the Party enjoins him to believe in, always ready with a handy slogan and on the look-out for ‘thoughtcrime’.

I was briefly a representative of my course (History, not Sociology) on some consultative council or other. Maeve (like so many shamradical teachers she enjoyed the diminutive as showing how right-on she was) was always the most assiduous to brown-nose the college dean in promoting any new initiative to both bureaucratise teaching and be nondiscriminatory to those students who, on any reasonable basis, should not have been there at all. One comic incident was a directive that hand-outs be printed on coloured paper because this was supposedly helpful to those ‘suffering from dyslexia’. I intervened to say that our class had discussed this and decided that puce was the best shade. This nonsense was, of course, taken seriously.

There is a fine characterisation of the real attitude of Bayton and Ruskin to academic work in Geoffrey Hawthorn’s Enlightenment and Despair (Cambridge University Press, 1976): he remarks that in 1909 the American Sociological Association explained the rise in interest in sociology as being the need for 'instruction of practical use in reform. Most students were uninterested in theoretical matters' (191). Bayton’s teaching was entirely third-hand, parotting canards such as Hegel’s ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’ and that Weber used the phrase ‘iron cage’ – stuff she picked up from textbooks by writers who had never read the originals, regurgitated by students and marked as correct by equally ignorant examiners.

Like all the other shamradicals she was silent over the outrage of a student playing the marching music of the Liebstandarte SS at a student union disco and his friend publishing in the student journal an article calling for a new Shoah. She, nor any of the rest of those wankers, offered me any support when the college issued me with a ‘final written warning’ for ‘having brought the college into disrepute’ by denouncing the nazis, the silence of the student body, ‘union’ and staff at Burford Leveller’s Day. (see http://david-murray.livejournal.com/8960.html?mode=reply)

the whole point of Hitler's philosophy is that we are running out of space for men and women to live as their ancestors lived; free from credit, debt and interest, free from the international web of abstract finance (Dominick Heriz, 'Thus Spoke Adolf the Great', The Trumpet, No 2,  February 2004)

Somewhere, there is a parallel universe where a non-racist Hitler has turned the Earth back into a classical paradise, where it is everyone's duty to perfect themselves and where culture is more valuable than money. (ibid)

Do-goodery

The real nature of that sensibility which you call ‘political correctness’ is elided by the way in which you, and those like you characterise it (google <campaign against political correctness>  to see more of this). To grasp this sensibility we need to return to its roots in the culture of the CPGB. The most interesting account of this is by, appropriately, Ruskin’s most respected and famous author, the late Raphael Samuel. His three-part study published in New Left Review in the mid 1980s was a fine illustration of Hegel’s remark that a world can only be comprehended when its creative potential is finished - the shades of night were well down upon that culture. His study was both an evocation and obituary for that tradition he grew up in. His central insight into the real dynamic of the sensibility institutionalised in the CPGB was summarised in a quote from a character in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook:

The Communist Party is largely composed of people who aren’t really political at all, but have a powerful sense of service

(Raphael Samuel, ‘The Lost World of British Communism’, New Left Review, No 154, November/December 1985, p 46; Quoting The Golden Notebook, 1977, p177)

In other words, the political culture of Stalinism was not at all about the taking of state power to effect the transition to a new order, it was of the same kind as that which formed the Labour Party. Confirmation of this was given in a TV programme a few years ago which showed the outrage of CPGB and Trotskyist activists that their rhetoric had actually been taken at its face-value by the Brit state - they had been targeted by the secret services (SHOCK! HOOROR! OUTRAGE!).

(See http://david-murray.livejournal.com/998.html?mode=reply)

Samuel himself  made a remarkable statement at a conference in 1987 to reflect on the New Left of thirty years earlier. He commented that:

I’m a lifelong socialist, but I actually lost faith in socialism about thirty years ago, in the sense that I haven’t wanted to live in a socialist society since sometime about the mid fifties. If I thought we were about to have a socialist Britain, I am not at all sure what, as a socialist, I would feel about it .. What I care about is a socialist movement. What I care about is socialism as a metaphor for solidarity, for opposition and for collectivism.

(Raphael Samuel, 'Then and Now', in Robin Archer et al, Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On, Verso, 1989, p149) (for more on this, see http://david-murray.livejournal.com/1451.html)

This really is the core and the dynamic of that which is so poorly characterised as ‘political correctness’: A sham solidarity which denies the reality of class order. Emblematic of this is the (so far as I know) painless shift of Peter Tatchell from the avowedly anti-cap Labour Left to the avowedly pro-cap Green Party.

What is remarkable is that the denial of class-struggle is common both to the proponents of that which is called ‘Political Correctness’ and those who so tediously diss it. I’m aware as I look back over this how far I am from really grasping what ‘Political Correctness’ is about. Here may be another clue: For another characterisation of this sensibility, at the level of the State, see Correlli Barnett’s ‘Decline and Fall’ series of historical studies of the Brit state in the mid of the last century. His major claim is that the possibility of national regeneration after the defeat of the Third Reich was thrown away by the softy lefty policies of the Attlee administration, continuing the anti-technological and idealist pacifist policies of the League of Nation folk (ie the “Politically Correct” of their day). When I first read it I was gripped by this claim (as were many others). However, it has been shown (just about as conclusively as such things can be) by David Edgerton that every one of Barnett’s claims are false: that since at least the Dreadnought programme the Brit state has pursued a policy of 'liberal militarism', preparing for hitech warfare. The really remarkable thing about Barnett’s thesis (and its more general form, the Barnett/Weiner thesis) is how and why these became so popular and rapidly became such a part of political commonsense. Part of the answer must be because the Brit state has for so long adopted the camouflage of being nonmilitarist (as against those Continental johnnies) when in fact it has not lost a major war since 1783.

The analogy I am suggesting is that the Barnett/Weiner Thesis is like those who diss 'political correctness', and that what they both fail to realise is that what they set themselves up against is actually another form of their own conservatism, but masqueing itself as being oppositional.

The Attlee administration has for long been the lost land of Cokaygne for those who live in Ruskania. But that government was actually quite the opposite of how they constructed it. It continued the policy of high-tech militarism by commencing the A-bomb programme; its NHS was a policy of Bismarck’s; its nationalisation policies were actually an aid to capitalism.  The pieties of those who valorise that government, far from being remotely subversive are actually an important part of the Hegemony.  It's worth noting that the apologist for Nazism, Debbi Hollingsworth, mentioned above is a Labour leftist and training to join the social-worker arm of The Police.

That which is called “Political correctness” is not remotely subversive. Anti-racism is now the commonsense of the Hegemony; Capital does not care what the colour of its ‘hands’ are.  You, and those like you, who take on ‘political correctness’ are actually helping its self-legitimation.  'Political Correctness', aka the culture of the alternistas, is actually part of the shamshow of  opposition  -  a vacuuous  charade whose members will always refuse the moment of decision.

The world is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than (some of us) can imagine.

Did Roth loose the plot?

Philip Roth, The Plot Against America, Vintage 2005, ISBN 0-099-47856-0

Philip Roth is one of modern America’s best-known novelists, famed for his comic Portnoy’s Complaint and his Pullitzer Prize trilogy beginning with American Pastoral. The Plot Against America was inspired by a remark in Arthur Schlesinger’s autobiography that in 1940 isolationist Republicans had considered inviting Charles Lindbergh to put himself forward as a presidential candidate. Roth asks ‘What if ?’ This novel is his answer.

After Lindberg arrived at Paris following the first solo flight across the Atlantic he became ‘the most famous man alive’. His achievement and his person became an icon which expressed the fantasies both of conservatives (he was a teetotal nonsmoker who did not dance, was a ‘real gent’) and of modernists (the Nietzschean hero incarnating his will in technology to perform an act whose meaning was itself) (1). This fusion of contraries renders it unsurprising that he became an admirer of that political movement, National Socialism, whose rhetoric and theatre fabricated that same fusion. Nothing is made of this cultural meaning of Lindbergh by Roth, who instead Roth does focusses on Lindbergh’s anti-semitism and admiration for Hitler.

The shock nomination of Lindbergh at the Republican Party convention is seen through the eyes of a young ‘Philip Roth’ in this imagined alternate world. Roth writes a fragment of his autobiography with a lovingly textured attention to the details of everyday life. The family of the fictional narrator ‘Philip Roth’ is the actual family of real author Philip Roth. This realism of the everyday seems to transmit a verisimilitude to the imagined history of his alternate world, where just one event appears to transform the political and cultural landscape. The narrator’s father is a staunch anti-fascist who refuses promotion because this would mean the family relocating to a neighbourhood which had a strong section of the German-American Bund – a pro Nazi group. His mother is a community activist; one of the powerful features of  this novel is the picture it gives of the life of a mother in a time not far from ours.

Lindbergh wins the Presidential election by a landslide. He signs peace treaties with The Third Reich and with Japan. At home he institutes a policy aimed to erode Jewish identity be establishing the Office of American Absorption which encourages Jewish boys to spend time working on farms. This causes a major split in the Roth family as his elder brother, Sandy, enlists in this programme and comes home with a changed accent, having got used to eating bacon and insisting to his outraged father that nothing has really changed in America and that his father is a ‘ghetto Jew’. His aunt works for, and then marries, Rabbi Bengelsdorf. This is the only major figure in the narrative who does not have a counterpart in the real history. His role is critical both in the world which is constructed by the narrative of The Plot and in the … plotting, in the articulation, of the novel itself.

Bengelsdorf is a conservative who wishes to curry favour with the American elite and does so by endorsing the candidature of Lindbergh. This not only neutralises Jewish hostility to him, but ensures the support of liberal Americans, in the words of Philip’s cousin, Alvin, he succeeded in ‘Koshering Lindberg for the goyim’.

There is little opposition to the rule of Lindberg, what there is centres on the unlikely figure of Walter Winchel, a muck-raking journalist and anti-fascist. Winchel promotes himself as a stalking-horse presidential candidate, and then stands for congress. His denunciation of the President as a fascist leads to antisemitic riots. Finally, he is assassinated. Shortly after this point in the novel the first-person narrative is broken by another narrative – no longer in the first person, but in the form of summaries ‘Drawn from the Archives of Newark’s Newsreel Theatre’. This change in viewpoint accompanies a change in the mode of verisimilitude. From the seeming authenticity of Roth’s alternative autobiography we shift to a story which reads like the synopsis of a Tom Clancy novel: Lindberg embarks on a national flying tour to counter the sympathy for Winchel; he disappears; the vice-president mounts a coup backed by the military; liberals and labour leaders are arrested; Lindberg’s wife escapes from custody and broadcasts a denunciation of the coup. Congress calls a new election which Roosevelt wins by a landslide. The Japanese military strike Pearl Harbour in late 1942 and history is back on course.

The narrative then shifts back to the first-person and Roth relates a story told to his mother by her sister, who learnt it from Rabbi Bengelsdorf who was a confidant of Lindberg’s wife. This is a story which Tom Clancy would have rejected as wildly implausible; that the kidnapping of Lindberg’s child in 1932 was actually carried out by agents of the Third Reich who took the baby to Germany and blackmailed Lindberg into accepting the presidential candidacy. However, Lindberg turns out be be insufficiently antisemitic, merely – in Himmler’s words -  ‘a dinner-party antisemite’, so his ‘disappearance’ is arranged.

The Plot Against America is actually two narratives. Shifting from one to the other is like putting down one book and opening another. The ‘Clancy’ narrative is ridiculously implausible in many ways. Its function can only be to fictively get history back onto course (what is know in the jargon of alternate-history buffs as a ‘second-order counterfactual’). However this narrative destablises itself by containing the story that the political career of Lindberg was choreographed by the Third Reich. Yet this revelation is itself sourced only from the Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who later wrote it up in My Life Under Lindberg. It is significant that Roth mentions that his mother heard it from her sister  ‘her source none other than Anne Morrow Lindberg’ – yet a few lines later it is made clear that the aunt heard it from her husband Rabbi Bengelsdorf. Confused by this …. ? Well, the more I re-read and re-think on The Plot Against America the more confused I became.

It would be charitable to think that all of this was an artful strategy to promote a postmodernist scepticism toward historical narratives - in reality the only reasonable construction of it is that Roth has dug his narrative into a hole and needs a Heath-Robinson device to extract it.

Here we have a fine writer who publishes a novel which is clearly on issues close to his heart which yet uses the clumsiest of plot devices to alter what seems to be an inexorable movement. It is significant that the ‘Philip Roth’ who narrates the story announces the shift with the remark that: ‘then it was over. The nightmare was over. Lindberg was gone and we were safe’. On participant at the Book Club commented that: ‘The first thing you learn at school about writing a story is to avoid the ending that declares the whole story was a dream ... but that is what Roth does in this book’. So what is going on here? Is this just a clumsy device ? Do we accept that a fine writer can sometimes be a bad writer ? Or perhaps it was deliberately clumsy - pardon the oxymoron. What do we make of the bizarre conspiracy story that Lindberg had all along been a puppet, and yet the status of this is undermined as soon as it is uttered ?

It is often remarked that there is a sense in which all historiography is about its contemporary world, as well as about the past which is its ostensibly subject. This is even more so of alternate history – this is inherently ‘presentist’ (2). So what is The Plot Against America saying about the America of the early and mid noughties ? It is noteworthy that conservatives have tended to excoriate the novel and for liberals and leftists to praise it (3). One reviewer points out that  there are a number of ‘easy parallels between Lindbergh in his airplane and Bush in his flight suit’ (4). However, this parallel actually shows just the opposite of what the reviewer intended: No-one can take seriously George W Bush as an aviation hero and no-one can seriously see a real parallel between Moslems in present-day America and Jews in that of the novel, or indeed under the Third Reich. Anyway, the central political appeal of the novel’s Lindberg was his campaign against overseas involvement of the American military ... so where is the parallel with Bush?

Indeed the implausibility of the ‘Clancy’ part of the novel is actually echoed by the central political story of the main narrative. For an allohistorical construction to be plausible the event which triggers the shift of history from its actual course onto another one must not be dependent on the situation which it causes (5). In fact it is utterly implausible that the massively popular Roosevelt would have been defeated in 1940. Fascism does not just arrive out of a clear blue sky - in Italy, Germany and Spain it was a response to a strong working-class movement which was contesting state power. That was not the situation in 1940 America. The central event of this allonarative, the election of Lindbergh, is only plausible given the situation which it engenders. Indeed the cental axis of this narrative is Lindberg, his subversion by the Third Reich, his election and his disappearance. This takes the 'great man' theory of history so seriously as to ignore a key absurdity in the 'backplot' of the novel, ie that the UK continues fighting the Third Reich even when it receives no material support from the USA - in fact, by the middle of 1940 the British State was unable, financially to continue the war in the absence of American aid.

This novel surely evinces a curious fascination with the Great Man, to such an extent as to marginalise material concerns. Lindberg is constructed as a kind of American Mussolini who comes to power by the force of his own 'charisma'.  This is to indulge in a kind of cosy liberal paranoia, whereby fascism can arrive at any time out of a clear sky (6). At least part of the function of this is to create an Other, against which liberals can smugly contrast themselves. As the political villain of this story is Lindberg, so its hero is Roosevelt, yet it was he, not a fascist decorated by Hitler, who did, in actual fact ‘actually did consign an entire ethnic group to hinterland internment camps’ (7). The strategic function of this conceit is to elide the complicity which liberals have so often show to fascism (and indeed Stalinism). Similarly Roth must have been aware that the real Walter Winchell ended his political life as an odious McCarthyite who denounced Josephine Baker to the FBI as a communist agent.

Artistically and politically this novel is a failure. It is intellectually flabby and morally suspect. Its virtue is to show the falsity of the common accusation that alternate history is merely the making up of stories. Taken seriously, it shows that such a story must have an internal consistency and plausibility.

agency is structured by love, creativity and intelligence … domestic labour depends on the ground state of the cosmos … the working class is contained within all of us … very few people do not do any work at all [and are, thus, at least partly working class] … the capitalist and the worker are in all human beings … the major problem for social change is that we all at loggerheads with one another … [we can overcome this by realising that] we can identify with anyone on the planet … individually and collectively we all need to do what we can to combat global warming.

dialectic … is a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie … it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation … it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary.

Added Later

How to not understand Marx

Dialectical Drivel

thesis, antithesis and synthesis … the Hegelian language .. the ritual formula …The yes becoming no, the no becoming yes, the yes becoming both yes and no, the no becoming both no and yes, the contraries balance, neutralise, paralyse each other
(MARX Poverty, p 163 - 4).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

COMTE Positive: Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, 'Freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau', AMS Press Inc, NY, 1974, 1st publ. 1855

GENOVESE World: Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, Wesleyan University Press, 1988

HALFPENNY Positivism: Peter Halfpenny, Positivism and Sociology - Explaining Social Life, George Allen and Unwin, 1982

KAUFMANN Owl: Walter Kaufmann, The Owl and the Nightingale, Faber and Faber, 1959

MARCUSE Reason: Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 2nd edn, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969

MARX 1859 Preface: Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels - Selected Works in One Volume, Lawrence and Wishart, 1977

MARX Poverty: Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Words Vol 6, Lawrence & Wishart, 1976 (1st publ 1847)

MUELLER 'Legend': Gustav E Mueller, 'The Hegel Legend of "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis" ', Journal of the History of Ideas Vol XIX No 3, June 1958

PRINZ ‘Motive’: Arthur M Prinz, 'Background and Ulterior Motive of Marx’s "Preface" of 1859', Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol XXX No 3, July-September 1969

SAMUEL 1980: Raphael Samuel, ‘British Marxist Historians I’, New Left Review, No 120, March-April 1980

THOMPSON ‘Poverty’: E P Thompson, 'The Poverty of Theory’, in his The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, Merlin Press, 1978

ZEITLIN Ideology: Irving M Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory, Prentice-Hall, 1968

He [Devlin] .. denies any theoretical limits to the power of the State to legislate against immorality, maintaining that the ‘suppression of vice is as much the law's business as the suppression of subversive activities’.